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I'd heard a fair bit about Adelaide-based physicist Tanya Monro before I actually met her. I knew about the awards, the early career achievements, the successful juggling of family and job.

But when I actually met her, nothing had prepared me for the whole package.

Now aged just 38, Monro was made a full professor of physics at the age of 31. Along the way she's won a string of awards including South Australia's Australian of the Year, Telstra Business Woman of the Year (Community and Government), a Prime Minister's Science Prize, and just this year, a physics medal from the Australian Academy of Science.

She's also published over 400 research papers and supervised over 20 PhD students.

I also discover through a colleague that Monro makes her own clothes and even designs her own shoes — which I've already noticed are sexy and gorgeously high.

While I push away thoughts of 'the Nigella of Science', I have to concentrate hard to keep up with our conversation, as the words and ideas tumble out of her mouth.

This intriguing woman's enthusiasm for science is totally infectious, and after half an hour of hearing about her research, I actually find myself wishing I'd studied physics instead of biology. Unbelievable.

"People say I'm an excellent role model. I think I'm a terrible role model!," says Monro.

"In the good times, I'll work till midnight and in the bad times I work till 3 o'clock in the morning."

And so when she claims she 'writes physics papers late at night as a form of stress relief', you kind of think: 'yeah, I can believe it'.

The daughter of an Italian immigrant, and raised in Sydney's working class suburb of Bankstown, Monro was musically gifted as a child and had always intended to be a musician.

Tanya had always planned to be a musician
(Source: Tanya Monro)

"But then when I was 15, I had this amazing physics teacher. I discovered that physics is so elegant and simple and beautiful and when you 'get' it, it's like that sublime joy you have when you understand how the world fits together. It's like Bach."

At the University of Sydney, she won a gold medal for physics and then headed off to the UK with her new husband David to do her post doctorate.

Within two years of flourishing in this most competitive of academic environments, and aged just 27, she was offered a 10-year fellowship by the Royal Society and given tenure at the University of Southampton.

Five years later, Monro was back in Australia, lured by an offer from the University of Adelaide to be their very first professor of photonics (the science of light).

Photonics, Monro explains, is about finding new ways of generating, transmitting and using light to tell us more about the world.

"The most well known and the largest impact photonics is through telecommunications." All of today's telecommunications (phones and computers), she says, rely on optical glass fibres, just the thickness of a hair, to send information around the world in the form of photons (particles of light).

"But this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what photons can do … photonics is already changing the way we do medicine, the way we treat cancer, the way we detect the quality of our drinking water."

Fantasies

While this is pioneering science indeed, what makes Monro's approach even more unusual is her passion for bringing together disparate areas of science.

The centre she heads up, the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing, is an unusual, trans-disciplinary beast where scientists of all shapes and colours collaborate under one roof.

"We are 140 physicists, chemists and biologists coming together to create new tools, that allow us to ask different questions. That is challenging to people's comfort zones, and is a very different way of doing science. Because if you're a specialist in a certain area, you know how that community thinks, you know how to focus your efforts because you'll be essentially rewarded by that system.

Tanya explains that traditionally, a person would train as a scientist is a specific area and then stick to it.

"We had to pick something, and we became the world's expert by the end of our PhD in some subfield … but for me, what's interesting is the idea of creating knowledge between the existing discipline 'silos' — and creating new tools and technologies out of that knowledge.

"The idea here is: bring it together and let your fantasy run wild!"

One fantasy she is turning into a reality is an instant flu virus sensor, the development of which involved virologists, immunologists, chemists and physicists.

"The dream is that you'll go to the doctor and find out what you've got on the spot — not just be told to go home and sleep it off," she says.

The virus detector is made from an optical fibre coated with a metal deposit, to which antibodies of different strains of flu have been attached. This area is called the sensing region.

When the fibre is dipped in, say, saliva from the patient, the virus particles in that saliva bind to the antibodies that match them and this changes the optical density of the sensing region.

When white light is shone through the fibre, the sensing region lights up with a particular wavelength, allowing researchers to identify the strain of virus.

Such a device could be useful for identifying flu strains which might need special management, for example, in the case of pandemics.

"We're also developing new ways of monitoring the changes in the biochemistry of a single cell. Essentially, we're listening to cells.

"Now that's really dangerous kind of work in a way, because it's physics meets biology."

Good outcomes

While Monro lets her fantasies run wild at work, at home she has the same responsibilities and challenges as any other parent.

Her twin five-year-old boys were born six weeks prematurely, but when they were just three months old, her work required her to go to Washington — so she took them with her.

"I was chairing a committee meeting, so I had to go. And I had to take them, because I was still breastfeeding them. It was a nightmare! But you know? Everything's easy after that.

She believes her capacity to do good science, build good teams and 'get good outcomes' has been massively enhanced by being a woman.

"If there's a big deadline or something I'm really excited about, I know how far I can push myself, and that's thanks to motherhood."

The last time I met up with Monro, she was actually looking a little tired.

She explained that she'd been up most of the night, dealing with an unusual family emergency.

Her five-year-old son Alex had managed to wedge his foot deep inside the U bend of their toilet and got completely stuck, despite all efforts to remove him (she's still trying to work out how he got it in there).

Four hours later, and with the help of five emergency service personnel, her son was free.

Yet despite all the stress and lack of sleep, she was still smiling and cheerful.